Kids See A Future In Mainframes

Roger Kay
, ContributorI cover endpoints and how they relate to the cloud.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

It’s not just geezers using big boxes like these, which do the heavy computational lifting in today’s world

You probably don’t think about mainframes much. Most people don’t. I certainly don’t lose any sleep over them.

But they are out there, humming away in the background, running the deepest part of our electronically interlocked lives.

At Visa, the San Francisco-based financial services company, banks of them quietly process 145,000 transactions per second in 200 countries around the world.

Many other firms — from Interpol, the clearinghouse for cooperating international police forces, based in Lyon, France, to Heineken, the Amsterdam-based beer maker, to Fidelity, the giant financial services firm out of Boston, Mass. — also need the power of mainframes to run the heart of their operations.

Since mainframes were really the first computers — ENIAC, the earliest programmable general purpose computer, was completed in 1946 — we tend to think of them as old. And there is a general belief that the people who know about mainframes are old, too, you know, like the guy with the COBOL skills and dubious hygiene who shuffles along the corridor, looking like he eats his blue-plate special at 4:30 in the afternoon.

However, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only have mainframes evolved over time to keep up with technology and ever increasing workloads, but so too have the skills required to program them. And young blood is trickling into the trade every day by way of special training programs.

One such program is the Global Enterprise Technology (GET) minor at Syracuse University in upstate New York. There, Dave Dischiave (pronounced “des-shav-y” — which he likes to point out translates roughly to “from slaves” in Italian) teaches kids about mainframes.

The GET program was put together by a consortium of organizations. IBM, which sells most of the mainframes still being made these days, and mainframe users like J.P. Morgan Chase teamed up with Syracuse to ensure that fresh faces would continue to show up in the field over time.

Dischiave noticed that his students were plenty adept at working small computers like Apple iPhones, Dell notebooks, and small Hewlett-Packard servers, but they had no idea how really large systems work.

In his course, Dischiave puts the “Visa problem” to them. How would you process 145,000 transactions per second with no letup around the clock all year? You certainly wouldn’t duct-tape a bunch of iPhones together, now, would you?

He teaches the kids about how to break enterprise-class problems like this one down into manageable parts and introduces them to the tools to solve them.